• Identify the opportunity each target keyword niche offers your site
Compare the opportunity of different target keyword niches with easy to read bar charts.

Strategizer uses the amazing power of keyword niches to find your site’s very best money-making keywords. Strategizer then shows you how to use the long tail of search to work at the scale required to sell serious amounts of donuts! (Or whatever it is your site sells).

A keyword niche is a group of keywords containing one seed keyword phrase. For example, the chocolate donut keyword niche includes keywords containing chocolate donut - like chocolate glazed donuts and chocolate filled donut.

Strategizer goes beyond traditional keyword research

Traditional keyword research tells you how popular keywords are and how much competition there is for them. But traditional keyword research doesn’t tell you:

… if your site can beat the competition

… if your site can rank for a keyword

… if your site can convert traffic from a keyword

… which keywords your site will get most response for

Strategizer works with your Google Analytics keywords reports to answer these questions.

Site traffic analytics software such as Google Analytics is powerful but it leaves you lost in detail. It misses the big picture because it analyzes single keywords. Let's look at what that means ...

Single keywords don't bring enough sales (but keyword niches do)

Traditional keyword research and site traffic analysis both use single keywords. But single keywords rarely bring enough traffic and response. Here’s a real story with real figures (I’ve changed the names and keywords) …

Case study: Not enough donuts

James is an experienced online marketer running his own sites, including one selling donuts.

Research estimated approximately 2,400 searches a month on Google for donuts for the territories James sells to. If he gets to rank 3rd on Google for donuts he might get 8% of those searches coming to his site (192 visits a month). With a conversion rate of 4% he might make 8 sales a month.

Let's look at James's single-keyword dilemma with a donut graph that shows those 2,400 searches with donut as one big, er, donut:

James's site might rank 3rd on Google for donut and get 8% of that donut traffic. That's 192 visits shown by the 'bite' below:

If James's site can convert at 4% (of just 192 visits) then he'll make 8 sales a month. That's such a small % of the original 2,400 searches (something like 0.3%) that we can't see it on our donut doughnut graph:

That’s not enough donuts. As James said: “that won't pay the coffee bill, never mind the rent”.

James asked me about this and I said:

“Single keywords are for losers. You aren’t only interested in searches with the single keyword donuts; and you probably won't get top of Google's results for donuts for years (if ever).

You’re interested in the long tail of search – all searches containing donuts – the donut keyword niche – and there are nearly half a million searches made containing donuts every month (450,000 according to Google)”.

Here's another graph that compares the sales potential offered by the donut keyword niche (450,000 searches a month) with that from donut the single keyword (2,400 searches a month).

On the graph above:

The X-axis (across the bottom) is searches in a month: single keyword (2,400); keyword niche (450,000).

The Y-axis (the one on the left) is potential site visits: single keyword (192); keyword niche (36,000).

The donuts in the graph above represent potential sales - the bigger the donut, the more donuts can be sold.

Perhaps you can only see one donut - this is because with just 8 potential sales from searches with the single keyword donut, it is so small it's tucked away in the bottom left corner. The keyword niche donut (1,440 potential sales) is 180 times bigger.

Only by targeting keyword niches can James sell enough donuts to build a profitable business.

Why does everyone always talk about single keywords then?

Article after article by expert after expert talks about targeting single keywords. Why is that?

Perhaps it's the limitations of old tools and being stuck in an old way of thinking - you will have seen in this article that a shift in perspective is required to think about keyword niches rather than single keywords. And where are the new tools? (Don't worry I'll get to the new tools soon.)

Then there are some search marketers who have clients with the budgets to successfully target the few single keywords that do make a lot of money. (After all, someone has to come top for auto insurance, home loan and poker). They don't need to think about the long tail. Good luck to them but that's not helping the rest of us.

Whatever their reasons, this single keyword perspective is not helpful to the vast majority of us wanting to get serious results from our websites. Here’s another example (from one of my own websites this time):

Case study: How using single keyword analysis can get things seriously wrong

I have a page on a site that appears to target these two single keywords:

swot analysis

strengths and weaknesses

Check a few metrics and we see that the page …

… for swot analysis: is ranked 24th on Google and got 67 visits in the last 30 days. (That won't pay for my coffee.)

… for strengths and weaknesses: is ranked 217th on Google and got 20 visits. (No donuts for me either.)

If we monitor this page by those single keywords then it gets a fat fail. And what a mistake that would be, because the page is actually a success. Not for those two single keywords but for 2,419 different keywords. See this image from a Google Analytics report:

… and the page is a success for over 8,260 different keywords if we look at one year's visits:

The page is successful for keywords containingswot analysis and strengths and weaknesses ie, the swot analysis and strength and weaknesseskeyword niches.

This is the long tail of search and this is where achievable results and the real money are.

Monitoring single keywords misses the big picture. It misses the long tail and this is why single keywords are for losers.

Your analysis, your forecasting and your search marketing should target the head and the long tail - the whole body of any keyword niche.

Your focus must be on a keyword niche’s seed keyword (its head) eg, swot analysis. But you are after the long tail too. Here’s a mantra to capture that:

Target the head, exploit the tail

And here’s a method that will save you a dollar (it's the method I used before I built Strategizer with Wordtracker).

Think big, think keyword niches

When looking at your keyword reports in Google Analytics, forget the default Top 10 report. Use the keyword filter to see keywords 'containing <your keyword here>’. The filter is at the bottom of your keywords report and it looks like the image below:

You are now analyzing at scale – using keyword niches, and not just single keywords. That’s good because this is how your site works. For instance, you make a page about donuts and you make sales for those searching not just with donuts, but with all kinds of keywords containing donuts, such as chocolate donuts and glazed chocolate donuts.

These keyword-filtered results are fantastic. You can use them to find your most responsive keyword niches. The only problem is that it takes forever to look at more than a handful of keyword niches.

Example ...

My business management site gets around 100,000 visits per month from searchers using approximately 50,000 different keywords in one month. Here's an image from a Google Analytics report:

I might be out of business before I’ve filtered the results for all those different keywords, and I want to see the response rates of each niche ‘side by side’ so that I can compare them and find the best (the most responsive).

You can manually save the results of each filtered report to Excel to compare keyword niche results. This is what I‘ve been doing as a professional search marketer for nearly 10 years. It works but it can takes days to do …

… but if doing this manually sounds interesting to you then I show you how to do it here It will take a long time. Alterantively, you could save a few weeks of your life with an amazing new tool for the job ...

Strategizer

Strategizer tool will save you days of work by finding your site's top 2,000 keyword niches in a few minutes.

You can then sort those keyword niches by your chosen response metric - perhaps Goal Conversion Rate, Ecommerce Conversion Rate or even Visits or Bounce Rate. This will reveal your most responsive keyword niches.

For example, see the Strategizer report below (from a real ecommerce site but with the keywords changed to protect their identity). You can see on the right that the results are sorted by Ecommerce Conversion Rate (the % of visitors that bought something) ...

... these are the money keyword niches

... your most profitable keyword niches

... they are big enough to make a profit with because they are keyword niches and not single keywords.

Plus (and this is my favorite bit) if you currently get traffic and response from a keyword niche then getting more is easy because you are already beating the competition :)

Above you can see that as well as showing your site's most valuable keyword niches, Strategizer also shows you:

• Each niche's size (see Niche Size column in report above). This is an estimate of the total number of searches made on Google with keywords in your niches.

• Google's estimates of trends in demand for the same keyword niches, shown in Google Insights graphs.

• Your site's position on Google's results pages for up to 100 keywords, tracked over time in graphs.

This shows you the potential each keyword niche offers your site and therefore how much effort each niche deserves.

Top tip: for those of you working with clients: Strategizer uses the Niche Size and Market Share columns above to make Opportunity graphs you can use to show clients the potential of further PPC and organic search work.

Strategy can quickly become action - the Actions view gives you detailed actions to follow for each of your target keywords and a guide for your PPC.